ART VIEW

ART VIEW; A Monument to Energies, Human and Inhuman

By John Russell

Published: December 13, 1992

"Carbon" by Lothar Baumgarten is not like any other book that has come this critic's way. Nobly proportioned and built to evade and outlive the inroads of physical decay (it costs $325), the book has been published by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Its author is not quite like anyone else, either. A German artist, now age 48 and due for a large but unrelated exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum next month, Mr. Baumgarten is a combination of anthropologist, photographer, poet, storyteller, installation maker and connoisseur of names. (I cherish especially his map of the Paris subway, in which he rechristened every single stop.)

He has traveled in many a remote and outwardly inhospitable part of the world, aiming to live among its inhabitants as a concerned but, as far as possible, invisible presence. Like Claude Levi-Strauss in his classic "Tristes Tropiques," he looks with particular sympathy at peoples whose culture has been or is about to be destroyed, whether by malice or by all-permeating attrition.

But this time round, the society that he anatomizes is not a human society, though human beings brought it about. The subject matter of "Carbon" is the American railroad system -- its tracks, bridges, signals, locomotives, rolling stock, stations, marshaling yards, logos, names and crossings on remote country roads. This system, overwhelmingly grand even in disuse, gave a new dimension and new potential to American life and stood as a monument to energies, both human and nonhuman, that made the impossible possible.

"Carbon" is, in that context, the indisputable title for the book. For what is carbon, if not a constituent of all organic matter? In all that lives and burgeons, in everything that has revolutionized the terms by which we live, carbon plays a part. Carbon-14 has empowered us to date the past more accurately than ever before. Without carbon, there would have been no trains, no tracks and no imperious, implacable drive toward the Pacific Ocean.

The book owes little to traditional methods. At first sight it is a picture book made up of photographic double spreads, printed matte on archival paper and lightly sprinkled here and there with words, logos and single letters that have a poetical application.

On close examination, the reader will find, tucked into the back of the book but quite separate from it, 12 short stories based on a four-month peregrination of the surviving tracks all the way from Fayette County in Pennsylvania to Union Station in Los Angeles. (Some of the stories are by Mr. Baumgarten, in enviably limpid English. Others are by his colleague Michael Oppitz.)

So far from being amateurish travel notes, these are masterly brief studies of the survival, in areas where the railroads are now inactive, of patterns of life that long predate the arrival of the railroad. Along the abandoned tracks of the Tucson, Cornelia & Gila Bend Railroad, for instance, a black horse carried two Indian boys, sitting back to back with guns at the ready for a black boar or a javelina.

Sometimes, too, life has made a leap forward. Following the Humboldt River valley, Mr. Baumgarten saw hunters in coats marked with luminous green or pink fluorescent bars. Cattle, no longer branded, wore colored ear clips made of plastic. "Even wildlife walks around with colored radio collars. Hunted from helicopters with narcotic guns, they are marked for scientific research and thus electronically controlled."

At the very end of those stories he has inserted, with characteristic discretion, a concise one-page explanation of exactly what he was doing. The book finally shapes up, in fact, as a historico-philosophical inquiry into both the first motives and the present state of the great railroad systems that in the 1860's were built all the way across the United States, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

The structure survives, but largely in disuse and sometimes in dereliction. Human beings long ago deserted it for the airline and the automobile. But in its heyday the railroad system was the great game, the supreme locus of ambition powered by the urge to compete and excel by no matter what means.

"Carbon" has a surprise or two to spring in that context, as when along the line, way out in the open, a close-up of a cotton field

ablaze with white flowers reminds the reader of the thousands of migrant workers who once lived, or barely lived, by picking that particular crop.

The lines have not quite lost their ancient potency, either. There is an image of a train going full tilt across a high-flying bridge, on the Santa Fe Railroad, on an errand of mercy. (Laden with perishable vegetables, it was speeding toward an earthquake site in California.)

Nor can one mistake the fascination of that great locomotive of our day, the Diesel Roster. There are times, too, when the present has picked over the remains of the past and made use of them almost as garden furniture in the midst of a city in full evolution.

But as we are dealing with structures that in their glory days held the world fascinated, it has to be said that the great terminals now mourn for their vanished migrants. The broken bridges are the image of hard-won human contacts now discarded. Downtown city streets are still infiltrated by labyrinthine railway systems, but rarely do they seem to know quite what to do with themselves.

As for the names of the railroad companies, or ex-companies, they now have an elegiac quality. Secreted on the inside of the jacket of the book are the names of close on 250 of those companies. Some of them, like Conrail and Amtrak, are still very much in being. But most of them have a tombstone quality.

Who today remembers taking a ticket on the Keokak Junction Railway, the Roscoe, Snyder and Pacific Railway, the Tippecanoe Railroad or the Chillicothe Southern Railroad? If there is poetry in those vanished names, it is because, as Mr. Baumgarten says, "they are polyphonic. They talk back to us about the confrontation of two multiple-shaped worlds: that of the continent's first inhabitants and that of the pioneer migrants to the West.

"On the one hand," he goes on, "the names reflect the movement of a territorial expansion, the natural destination of which was the Pacific Ocean; on the other, they testify to an older stratum, that of the native societies, their rivers and mountains, fords and trails."

From this interaction, a great fascination results, and it is memorably conveyed in this wonderfully evocative and quite unpreachy book.

Photo: From the book "Carbon," a train going full tilt across a high-flying bridge on the Santa Fe Railroad. (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles)